Increasingly, consumers are demanding portable devices, such as personal digital assistants (PDA's), MP3 players, portable memory systems, advanced cell phone systems and cameras. Traditional non-volatile memory storage systems, such as floppy disks, hard drives, and optical drives, are generally unsuitable for use in portable devices because they suffer from mechanical failures, excess weight, large size and high energy consumption. As a result, manufacturers of portable devices are turning to solid-state memory systems, such as flash memory and electrically erasable programmable read-only memory (EEPROM).
More recently, manufacturers have introduced memory devices having multiple planes. Such multiple plane devices have been implemented in single-level cell and, in particular, in multi-level cell memory devices. In some particular examples, the devices are capable of simultaneously erasing one block within each plane. Further, some devices are able to write one page into each plane simultaneously.
However, to fully implement these capabilities into existing hardware systems, traditional methods rewrite block management software layers. Such block management software layers tend to be complex and represent a large labor investment. Moreover, block management layers have been tested with and made compatible with data storage and transfer protocols, such as filing systems, USB mass storage layers and USB media transport protocols. Changing these block management layers and routines would consume a considerable labor investment and represents a large cost in development of replacement block management software. As such, an improved method for integrating multi-plane memory devices into computational systems would be desirable.
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